User:Kartikeya UCL/Sumathi Rao

Sumathi Rao

Sumathi Rao is a faculty member at the Harish-chandra Research Institute in Allahabad working in the field of condensed matter physics.

Rao was a member of faculty at The Institute of Physics at Bhubaneshwar for eight years before moving to HRI.

She received an undergraduate education at the Maharaja Sayajirao University at Vadodara. A postgraduate education at the Indian Institute of Technology, Mumbai and a Ph.D. in 1983 from the State university of New York at Stonybrook New York, in the USA.

Rao was also a post-doctoral fellow at Fermilab in Chicago from 1983-86 and a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Wisconsin at Madison from 1986-87.

Apart from her academic work, Rao has been involved in issues of women in physics since 2000, when she was asked by the IUPAP subgroup on women in physics to conduct a survey of 30 women in physics in India. Participating in the exercise, changed her own perception that there was no serious gender bias in the profession.